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Rev. Richard Boone: An influential fighter of racial injustice you may not know much about

Krista Johnson   | Montgomery Advertiser

On Mobile Highway, out past St. Jude and George Washington Carver High and the Robert E. Graetz neighborhood, stands a historical marker recognizing the service of a man who has been largely unrecognized. 

The Rev. Richard Boone marker was erected after his death, in the place where he led about 1,500 Alabama State College students and black community members to join the Selma to Montgomery March. They left the campus — where administrators and state politicians had tried to prevent their participation — and walked past St. Jude, where those coming from Selma would spend the night.

At that spot along Mobile Highway, where residents of a now-demolished apartment complex came to refer to Boone as the food stamp man, he joined those who had made the long trek to Montgomery. 

Mary Boone was a young girl when she stood outside of Carver with her schoolmates, watching as thousands of people marched past, demanding that children like her grow up with the same opportunities as anyone else. She couldn't have known it at the time, but the man she'd go on and marry was in that crowd. 

The march would be just one of many historic moments of which Richard Boone would find himself a part. It is for this reason that Mary Boone has worked so hard to ensure his name is recorded in history, by fighting for the marker, for a day in his honor and the naming of a roadway after him. 

This isn't because she's a good wife, Mary Boone said, but because she's a good citizen. His service should be known. 

He 'changed my life forever'

In 2006, Teresa Baxley, a graduate student at Alabama State, met Richard Boone at his home one afternoon, in search of another man to write her thesis on. James Bevel was a well-known leader in the civil rights movement and she had been told Boone knew how to find him. 

Living in a tiny, red brick home in west Montgomery, "The man who opened the door to me that day changed my life forever," Baxley said. 

So many of the events Bevel was recognized for participating in, Baxley would learn Boone was right there with him. 

Born in Lowndes County, Boone's family moved to Montgomery when he was 3. The systemic racism he endured in Alabama's capital city as a child, in addition to the fierce discrimination he suffered once joining the military, enraged the young Boone. 

Those experiences, Boone would tell Baxley, sparked a fierce hatred of white people. A change of heart, or rather what he felt was a calling from God, led him to teaching passive resistance alongside Martin Luther King Jr. across the South. 

“There is no written mention of his presence in the struggle and no honors for his commitment and service. The man who spent his life totally committed to non-violent resistance in the struggle for African Americans’ civil rights remains virtually invisible in recorded history of the movement," Baxley wrote in her thesis, published in 2009. 

Outside of the pages she published, the recognition Boone's wife arranged and files tucked away in Alabama State's archives department, Boone is one of countless activists whose diligent work went unnoticed. 

On Feb. 25, 1960, about 35 Alabama State students organized a sit-in at the Montgomery County Courthouse Snack Bar. Nine of them would later be expelled from the school — due to the governor threatening to pull the historically black college's funding if they weren't punished. 

'We are sorry': City, county honor ASU students expelled 59 years ago for lunch counter protest

It would be nearly 60 years later and after Boone died in 2013 before apologies were offered to those students but the sacrifice made was not lost on the young Boone. Witnessing that moment ignited the path he'd continue on through the rest of his life.

Boone's listed contributions started with his membership in the Southern Christian Leadership Council, where he rallied for support of the Freedom Riders when they arrived in Montgomery in February 1961. 

In 1962, Boone spent the year organizing black activists throughout the country. When a bomb took the lives of four black girls at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began focusing its efforts on blacks' voting rights. 

King assigned Boone as the field director in Selma and Dallas counties in 1963. The field workers, Mary Boone explained, wore overalls to blend in with the farm workers they were galvanizing.

When Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered in February 1965, Bevel, with Boone at his side, organized the mass meeting in Selma where the discussion of a march began. On Bloody Sunday, Boone was one of about 500 who participated. 

Despite these contributions, Boone's record in history was lost when he chose not to follow King out of Alabama. The movement's shift toward housing led them north, but Boone disagreed. 

More: A birthday purpose: Mary Boone raises money for opening of Pathway House

"He was pretty much the only person who stuck around after movement," Baxley said. Boone told her, she said, "One of the biggest mistakes black people made was to start celebrating before the war was over. They'd won the battle, but lost the war." 

Boone's next step was to form the Alabama Action Committee. He went to work on forcing white businesses along Dexter Avenue to cease discrimination against their black employees. 

"Some of these stores had large black clienteles," ASU Historian Howard Robinson explained. "So AAC targeted these stores and they forced a number of them either to go out of business or to employ their black people in other ways than minimal positions."

Boone is also credited as bringing the federal food stamp program to Alabama. There had been fierce reluctance to the program, because "it'd make black people less dependent on white southerners," Robinson said. 

It was a time when, "Even a white person of modest income could have a yard man, because the wages paid to black were so depressed," he said. 

Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, "black people worked through the civil rights movement to influence the political system," Robinson said. Out of it came, "a generation of activists who pursued politics as a continuation of their activism."

Boone's activism led to his arrest more times than Mary Boone could count. The two would finally meet after his longest imprisonment.

In January 1970, Boone was charged with complicity in the attempted arson of Montgomery radio station WRMA. 

Four young black men from New York City were allegedly spotted by police trying to set fire to the station, leading to the eventual shooting death of two of them. 

One of the two surviving men told officers Boone had paid the group to set the fire, but testified at Boone's trial that they'd been paid only to picket the station. 

Sentenced to seven years, Boone wrote what is known as his toilet paper manifesto while in solitary confinement. 

"They are literally rolls of toilet paper he wrote on while in jail, still advocating for this peaceful nonviolent fight," Baxley said. 

"We must soon realize, if we intend to live a harmonious life that the external environment and the internal forces must be in complete harmony," Boone wrote. 

After two years, the charges against Boone were dropped and he was released. Mary Boone had heard all about him — from his work during the movement, to the numerous calls for his release. At that time, she was working with a group of activists trying to create a holiday in honor of King when the couple met. 

"These people — they were a different breed of people," Mary Boone said of her late husband and other civil rights activists. "They dropped everything in order to organize."

"I believed in the same things he was doing," she said of him. 

The two married and traveled through his work as a minister before returning to Montgomery in 1990. Richard Boone picked his activism right back up. 

In 1992, Boone protested against the SPLC's support of the appointment of a federal appeals court judge who had defended Alabama prosecutors accused of systematically excluding blacks from death penalty trial juries.

In the early 2000s, as Montgomery suffered with excessive brutality in its black communities, Boone joined forces with the Rev. John Alford and Sen. Charles Steele to form a citizens' review board. 

"He remained true to his home and tried to fight for social injustice," Baxley said of Richard Boone. "He was still protesting at the Montgomery County Courthouse for racial injustice in our court systems at age 70-something."

Boone spent the last decade of his life working with ASU's National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture. His contributions, Robinson said, were instrumental in ASU being selected as the location for the third interpretative center related to the Selma to Montgomery March.

"I did a lot of research and I could do presentations and I could talk about my research but I wasn’t there," Robinson said. "He was there. So anytime anyone would say something, when he stepped in, he was an authority. He wasn’t just a foot soldier — he wasn’t in King's inner circle, but he was part of the larger circle of decision makers. He was intricately familiar with these episode in the civil rights movements."

Thinking back on the time spent with Boone and learning his story, Baxley said Boone's passion was fueled by, "this idea that we should all be able to peacefully coexist for the greater good. He was truly looking for equal rights. ... He was such a self-sacrificing man that he truly needs to be remembered."

Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Krista Johnson at